Copenhagen cartoons a-go-go

Reactions and analysis

We’re putting together a cartoon guide to the Accord, called “The Copenhagen Accord-ing to Gort”. In the meantime, while you wait for the comedy gold to appear on your computer screen, check out the following four analyses (I haven’t bothered summating all the summit-was-a-catastrophe quotes from Barroso, Sauven etc etc) Though for once the NGOs seem to have gotten up on their hind-legs and called it like they see it.

“This accord is not legally binding, it’s a political statement,” said Nnimmo Bassey, chair of Friends of the Earth International. “This is a disaster for the poor nations – the urgency of climate change was not really considered.”

Dame Barbara Stocking, Oxfam’s chief executive, agreed. “World leaders in Copenhagen seem to have forgotten that they were not negotiating numbers, they were negotiating lives,” she said.

The most interesting takes are from two up-beat (Obama loving?) Americans, linked to later on in this post. First two downbeat ones, full of inventive invective and splendid spleen come from George Monbiot in the Grauniad and Joss ‘Plane Stupid’ Garman in the Utterly-and-soon-to-be-Russian-owned-Dependent.

“First they put the planet in square brackets, now they have deleted it from the text. At the end it was no longer about saving the biosphere: it was just a matter of saving face. As the talks melted down, everything that might have made a new treaty worthwhile was scratched out. Any deal would do, as long as the negotiators could pretend they have achieved something…”

“Late in the evening, the two men meet and cobble together a collection of paragraphs that they call a “deal”, although in reality it has all the meaning and authority of a bus ticket, not that it stops them signing it with great solemnity.”

Meanwhile, Joe Romm of the indispensable Climate Progress has two guest bloggers, both of whom are fans/enablers of the Obama administration, but/therefore have interesting perspectives on what was achieved (politics being the art of the possible and all that)

“Most importantly, China is now officially in the game in a way it has resisted since the Earth Summit almost two decades ago. The Copenhagen Accord is a two-part breakthrough with China: They are putting numbers on the table with a measurable pledge to join the global fight to reduce climate pollution, and they agreed to open their books on their rising emissions and allow a transparent review of their progress toward their emissions pledge. This breakthrough is important for the global climate effort, as well as encouraging the Senate to move forward and deliver the climate and clean energy bill to the president. China will act, and the China excuse is off the table.”

“Unfortunately though the agreement does not have a hard deadline to take the second step and turn it into a final legally binding agreement by 2010 in Mexico City. Such a provision would have provided the basis for a good answer to those who find the numbers and reduction targets in the accord lacking. As they will expire in one or two years they would, of necessity, need to be adjusted to continue reducing emissions at an appropriate pace. Nonetheless, UN General Secretary Moon and other parties have committed themselves to taking the next step and turning this document into a binding legal agreement by the next UN climate summit in Mexico City in 2010.

There is however a different aspect of this deal that could be the beginning of a game changer in how the world looks at ending carbon pollution. The Copenhagen Accord was not forged among our closest allies in the developed world; it was the product of cooperation between the US and a group of the largest carbon emitters in the developing world. In fact, this same group had met prior to the Copenhagen meeting in China to declare that they would never move beyond one of the core guiding assumptions of the Kyoto Protocol: that the world is divided between developed and developing countries and that only the former are required to take steps to curb their carbon emissions and be held accountable for those reductions.”